The Problem Facing New Generations of (Marvel/DC) Teen Heroes

I noticed a problem that felt new to me, the other day, regarding new teen heroes in the Marvel & DC comics universes. I looked around some and didn’t see anyone else talking about this specific problem so I thought I would try and work through it here.

Maybe someone else has caught this and said much smarter things. If so, go read them, and point me to it, I’d love to see it myself. Until then though, bear with me while I lay this all out.

Back in the Golden Age of comics we had sidekicks. Robin, Toro, Bucky, Speedy, and so on. They were all teens who helped our adult heroes fight crime. Realistically, off the basis of Robin, they were reader stand-ins. You, as a kid, couldn’t do adult things but you could help Batman, ya know?

They caught on quite well, and comics chugged along merrily.

The original Teen Titans

During the Silver Age things kept going, except now the teens formed teams of their own. The original Teen Titans for example. You also had, over as Marvel started up, teens in the form of the original X-Men.

They caught on quite well, and comics chugged along merrily.

The Original X-Men

The Bronze Age saw a lot of those teens start to age up. Robin went to college, Speedy had a drug problem, all normal later teen things (work with me here). But we’d lost a lot of the younger characters. Also, of some note, the main adult heroes did not age. Superman was still in his thirties, as was Batman. The Fantastic Four didn’t get older in general, though the Human Torch did, a bit.

That’s fine, there’s a bit of wobble when you can’t age out your characters, and it was still early days for a lot of these universes in so many ways, so no worry. Comics chugged along merrily.

As we entered the Modern Age (and look, I hate that for a lot of values the Modern Age started in about 1985 and we still consider everything up until now the Modern Age and you can find different people claiming different names for things but… argh work with me here) we saw a new group of teen heroes rise up in both universes.

Original New Mutants

This wasn’t coordinated, of course, but is significant. The New Mutants hit the scene, so the X-Men (now adults) could still have the Xavier School mean something. Jason Todd started as a teen becoming the new Robin, and things kept progressing.

Batman the other adult heroes stayed in their 30s. The first wave of teens were in their 20s now, which, again, you just have to accept, and this new crop of kids were 12-16. The margins got tighter.

Nightwing (the original robin) and Flash (the original Kid Flash)

Slowly though the new teen heroes got a bit older. Tim Drake was the new new Robin (Jason Todd having died for a while), and Impulse came around as a teen, but the original Robin was still in his 20s as was the original Kid Flash (now Nightwing and Flash respectively).

Generation X started up at Marvel, to introduce new teen mutants, to take the place of the original New Mutants, who were now all adults.

That leaves us in the early 2000s. It’s a bit sketchy in some ways but it worked.

Gargantus (not a teenager)

But since then? Well since then we’ve kept going and this is where the problem I see bubbles to the surface like Gargantus chasing innocent explorers.

We need to keep adding teen heroes. They’re relatable for the readers of that age cohort, they’re fun to craft, and they inject new things into the universe. So we keep doing it.

Since Generation X there have been at least three new classes at the Xavier School. Young Justice happened at DC and then they got new teens after that.

But Impulse, as an example, isn’t much older than he was at the start. A bit, sure, but not too much. Because the core, adult heroes, still can not age.

So you end up with less and less space to add new characters in.

And because of that, I argue, they aren’t sticking as well.

They can’t become “The new generation” because the last generation simply can’t get out of the way anymore. There’s no where left for them to age. So they get created, and used, and can be great, but then a new crop has to be threaded in, and if you use the last crop, since you can’t age them, it makes the new ones feel less special, so you just limit their use more and more.

Except a new crop has to come in after that and…you see the problem.

That isn’t to say there aren’t great new characters being made. There are, there always were. But the sheer number of new characters with no real space for them, because the previous generation can’t move up for them, is choking itself out.

I fear this is why there won’t ever be a new team of Titans or New Mutants that isn’t just the now-adult originals, that will also stick – long term. New team line-ups can’t age out and become richer and deeper, in general (yes the rare exceptions exist, but rarer and rarer), before they get replaced by a new set of teen characters.

Of course this is all a strange subset of the original “character can’t age” problem, but I feel like it is a specialized corner of it that keeps being ignored because of the necessity of constant appearance of movement.

Where does this go? I don’t know. I have no idea how to square this particular circle. I don’t think anyone does, honestly. You just hope something sticks and you do your work and you keep moving and in enough time it will sort itself out. But even then this feels like an insurmountable problem.

You still can’t age out the core heroes that make you billions of dollars. You can’t age out their original sidekicks, now with decades of history that are also making you that kind of money and who have huge fanbases.

The third wave of them? Same issue.

Past that though you have smaller and smaller numbers of characters that catch.

How does that end well? How is it fixed, realistically, without breaking anything else?

I don’t know. So I’m putting this out in the world, to possibly start the conversation, to plant the seed in other people’s minds as well, in a move of hope that someone will have an answer. At least that an answer can be started, and built over time.

But honestly, I don’t know the answer here, and I wish I did.